Saturday, 14 April (9:30am-5:30pm) “Contemporary Armenian Writing and the Parameters of the Literary”

Synopsis: The establishment of Armenia as an independent nation-state
presented Armenian literature with important opportunities. It
facilitated the greater cross-pollination between the literary capital
of the diaspora and Armenia, most notably through the literary journals
Inknagir, Arteria, and Pakine. While authors in the diaspora wrote about
the death of Western Armenian, their work was simultaneously
reinvigorated by an additional, however modest, critical mass of
readers. Similarly, the collapse of the Soviet publishing machine marked
a turning-point for litterateurs in Armenia, who were pushed to reinvent
all aspects of the literary marketplace.

Although the diaspora and Armenia have maintained different literary
preoccupations throughout this period, they share in common a
self-conscious strain of writing that has expanded the formal and
aesthetic possibilities of literature. In the diaspora, for example, the
works of Krikor Beledian and Marc Nichanian explore image-text relations
or the ways in which language, narrative, and visual representation
interact. In Armenia, an entire body of work that insists upon the
fluidity of literary genres has undone long-held assumptions about
poetry, prose, and drama. Taking these trends as a point of departure,
this conference seeks papers that address the ways in which contemporary
writers and thinkers have redefined the parameters of literature since 1991.